Note that I’ve moved my work to DanRosenfeld.com. This post and future work can be found there.
Photo — Adrian Mendoza
Some background
A bit less than ten years ago, I started to look into the question of why so few people were using videoconferencing. Videoconferencing had been commercial available for about 30 years at that point and free options like CU-SeeMe had been available for a decade, but relatively few people used VC regularly.
I–and many others–had wondered how big a role the lack of eye-contact played in the low adoption rate of video calling. I worked on some new approaches to solving this problem (e.g. this) and through this work, started a collaboration with Bill Buxton. Bill broadened my thinking beyond concerns about eye contact alone, turning me on to the larger issues of gaze awareness (i.e. awareness of what the person I’m talking to is looking at) and spatial awareness, as mediated by video conferencing systems.
I started thinking about how some of the relevant variables–scale, orientation, relative orientation, degree of eye-contact–could impact the qualitative experience of people interacting through video. How does the way that I and you are represented affect the way we feel about the interaction and roles that we play in the interaction? For the last year or so, I’ve been doing some experiments to see what kind of experiences I could create by manipulating these variables.
Here’s a quick experiment you can try to understand what I’m getting at. Make a Skype (etc.) call from a laptop to a friend with a laptop. Make the video full-screen. One of you should lie on your back and hold the laptop over your head (with the camera pointing at your face, of course); the other should put the laptop down with the screen flat against the ground, and kneel over it.
How does it feel? Straight guys tend to be especially disconcerted by this.
The Big Head
The Big Head project is one of these experiments. It’s a large, head-mount box with a 24″ LCD on the front showing a live video view of the wearer’s face. Of course, the face is flat, slightly miscolored, unmistakeably a video and much larger than usual.
The wearer’s face is captured with a video camera looking through a half-silvered mirror. There’s a second camera, which captures a view from the front of the box, near the eyes of the on-screen face. The outside view is shown on an internal LCD, which reflects on the half-silvered mirror; this way the wearer can look directly at the LCD and the camera at the same time. (This is essentially a tele-prompter, like Errorl Morris’ Interrotron).
The whole assembly is carried via floating frame, mounted to the shoulder and hips.
Big Head Internals
First outing – Halloween 2011
After about a year of occasionally building, fiddling about, premature optimization and enormous procrastination –with, for good measure, a few months on my back with a herniated disc–I was finally ready to take the Big Head outside my studio. My neighborhood has a pretty active Halloween and this seemed as good a time as any.
So I went out into the neighborhood at dusk with my good friend Mike Allen (the English guy) acting as M.C. and helping me from bumping into too many things.
The results you can judge for yourself from the video.
I watched this with a grin! Wonderful, Dan!
This is very cool, excellent job! how heavy is it?
Thanks very much David.
It’s maybe 40 pounds(?). It’s not too bad, since most of it is supported on the hips.
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This is really nice.
I’m looking forward to trying the VC experiment with my wife. Done correctly, an organization could really improve their VC experience with this knowledge. Thanks for sharing it.
Thanks very much.
If you end up doing the experiment, I’d love to know what it felt like to you.
Cool project! I’m curious though, how much modification would it take to stream the video back and forth from the head to a remote laptop? I imagine that this would allow the person wearing the Big Head to act as a surrogate body for a remote user, and could create a very powerful illusion of talking face-to-face with somebody.
Thanks a lot Nate.
I’ve thought about options like you suggest and a few other similar variations. It wouldn’t be hard at all, though you’d probably want to take some care with how you captured the video on the remote end to insure good eye-contact (by using something like an Interrotron).
Of course you’d have to add a laptop or suchlike to the Big Head; I wanted to avoid that initially since it’s often the least reliable component in systems like this.
this is grate, i love it!!!! i wanted to ask, did you all so make the music? i fined myself re-watching the vid just for the catchy, almost Aphex Twin genius. the fall to the flour humm humm humum!!!!
made my day!
Glad you like it.
The music was made by Kevin MacLeod. It’s a track called Human Beat.
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Nice work! Great concept and build. Did you ever consider a small form-factor projector and screen. That would make a huge dent in the size and weight of the head.
Thanks Matthew–really glad you liked it.
I’d have loved to use a projector, but I didn’t see a straightforward way to do it. The main problem is that a projector would need a large empty volume in the middle of the box to project through, but components like the internal screen, mirror, and camera need to occupy at least part of that volume.
Projection would work better on a larger head, and I’ll probably do that at some point.
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Great! Thanks for the share!
Nice! good to see what you are up to these days…
Thanks Chris. Hope our paths cross soon.
I love you for having done this.
Brilliant.
It is fantastic.
Thanks for sharing the Skype trick. lovely.
Kim
Aww–thanks. Really appreciate it.
Dan
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Tremendous! Looks fantastic! What’s your next project?
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Fantástico, mente brilhante a sua, parabéns querido =)
Muito obrigado Otavio
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Dan,
Nice job. We all enjoyed watching the video. There are some interesting questions about self and otherness, intimacy and distance that BIG HEAD begins to explore. We eagerly await the sequel!
Thanks!
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Awesome!!!
How are you powering it all!
You can definitely use this as an advertising tool.
Thanks a lot Dany.
It’s powered by a 12 Volt sealed lead-acid battery. Most of the electronics run directly from 12V, but I’ve got an inverter for the LCD, etc.
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Think outside the box much?
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